


> root access

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Series: > _ [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Child Abuse, Child on Child Sexual Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Grooming, Hand Jobs, Humiliation, Incest, M/M, Sibling Incest, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-07 13:30:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6806854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>> random access memory<br/>> drive_boot: X:/RECOVERED_!childhood<br/>> root access granted</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my beta/partner in crime [tuna mayo make it zesty](http://tsunamayo-makizushi.tumblr.com/)

He doesn’t play with you like he used to.

He turns sixteen right before you turn twelve. Dad buys him his own Lexus. Mom takes him to get his driver’s license. When they give him the keys, they tell him he can go wherever he wants with whoever he wants. Of course he can. He’s the eldest son, the prodigal child. Mana from heaven. Sunshine out of his ass. He can do nothing wrong. He’s perfect, the little shit.

It’s not that he’s the favorite, it’s that you’re the unfavorite. The problem child. The child who still has temper tantrums in middle school. The child who gets sent to the principal’s office once a week. The child who can never quite remember to do his homework, who never quite goes to bed on time, who sleeps through classes and still has bags under his eyes. You’re the kind of kid that always gets a head shake and an exasperated sigh, a _what are we going to do with you_ attitude.

So Kankri has one caveat on his emptor: Always be home in time to put Karkat to bed.

Mom would do it, but she always has her charity things at night. She’s almost never there when you get home from school. If she is, she’s taking frantic phone calls and reapplying her lipstick three times before she deems herself presentable enough to attend her latest fundraising gala.

Dad would do it, but he’s always at work. Always. One hundred percent of the time. Sometimes he comes home, maybe once a week to spend an hour with you, but it’s not enough, it’s _never_ enough. He’s the kind of lawyer that always puts the client first, even before himself. He does really important work, all this civil rights stuff, and he’s saved more people from the chair than you can count on both hands. That’s just the death penalty cases—then there’s all the states that pass bathroom bills, and all the places that refuse to perform gay marriages in this the year of our lord 2008, and all the accessibility laws he defends, and all the work he’s put into repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. You love your dad so much, and you’re so proud of him. Maybe you’ll grow out of your temper and into a better temperament, grow up to be like him. You just wish you saw him more often, in person rather than walking out of a courthouse doing a rushed interview with a local news reporter.

There’s nobody else, so it falls on Kankri. He makes you food and helps you with your homework and does all the household chores, because he is a good elder son and he does everything he’s supposed to. Just like you don’t. He’s the perfect son, quite the treasure. He even keeps a schedule of what chores need done when.

Today is Wednesday. Tonight is laundry night. And you are _terrified_.

Because you think you might have wet the bed last night.

First thing when you get home from school, you wrench your sheets off your bed and stuff them into a basket. Kankri catches you before you get all the way to the mud room, though. Literally catches you, hand on your arm. “Oh, Karkat. I didn’t realize your sheets needed laundered already. I thought I had taken care of them on Sunday. They shouldn’t need washed again until this weekend. Did something happen?”

Like he knows. Your stomach turns. “Nothing happened,” you grumble, and shift your eyes to deliberately fix on the floor.

“Did you stain them with something? I’ll have to pre-treat them if that turns out to be the case. Here, why don’t you show me and I can do it for you.” Fuck no are you showing him where it is, let alone what it is. You yank the basket away from him, try to get out of the vice of his fingers, but he holds you solidly in place. “Show me, Karkat. I need to know how to help you.”

You want the ground to swallow you whole. As it is, Kankri lets go of your arm—there have to be fingerprint bruises there, have to be—and starts airing your dirty laundry. “It’s nothing,” you lie to him again.

Too late. Kankri’s already thrown your pillowcases to the ground after turning them over in his hands. “If you’d had a nosebleed,” he’s still nattering to himself, “then I could use peroxide. I don’t think that would ruin the dye, but it could take a while to treat.” Going through your fitted sheet this time, testing the elastic edges with the span between thumb and forefinger, checking for marks.

Your fingers have the handles of the basket in a death grip. Your face has to be melting off with its own heat by now. This is more humiliating than waking up like that. Because Kanri’s hands move in from the edges, seek out the middle, and find the crusted-over patch dead center.

“Oh,” he says, dropping your laundry immediately, and his lips curl.

He doesn’t really say anything after that. Which is weird. Your older brother is usually full of words. Every waking moment he’s talking your ear off about something stupid, but it’s only when you talk back that one of you gets in trouble. (You. Always you. He riles you up and gets you to raise your voice at him and then it’s always your fault.) “What?” you dare him.

“Well, I’m not quite sure I know how to deal with this,” he says through a sneer. He’s still rifling through your flat sheet, trying to find the corresponding stained patch. “I thought you had better self-control than that, but, ah. I see it’s happened anyhow. Why didn’t you tell me right away? Did you think you could hide this from me?”

“I—no?” Is that the right answer? You didn’t want to hide it from him, you just never wanted him to find out. Those are different, right?

“I don’t want you to hide things like this from me,” he tells you. “I confess, I’m not quite sure how to get this, ah. Particular stain out. I’ll have to do a Bing search, I suppose. Why don’t you get your other,” he coughs delicately, “dirty clothes so I can see their stains and pre-treat them as well?”

You thought you could get away with the sheets. You really could. He’d go through your hamper to find your sleep pants eventually, though. Those could wait, the sheets you need to sleep on tonight, but you didn’t think he’d want to wash your clothes until this weekend—your throat closes up and you metaphorically dig your heels in. “I don’t want to.”

Kankri sighs. “That’s quite alright. I didn’t expect you to be acting like such a child over this, but if you’re going to be a baby about it, then sit down and start on your homework while I gather the laundry myself.”

“No!” It comes out of you so automatically he might as well have hit behind your elbows with a rubber hammer, and you drop the laundry basket out of instinct as well. “If you’re going to be like that, then I’ll just do it myfuckingself.”

“Watch your language,” Kankri says idly, but you’re already storming out of the room, hands shaking too badly for you to give him a coherent one-finger salute.

Once you’re back in your room, you stare at your empty, naked bed like it’s a mark of failure. You already checked—it didn’t make it through to the mattress, there was nothing there. The only reason there was any on the sheets was that your sleep pants only had a button fly. Kids in double digits, kids like you, aren’t supposed to wet the bed like babies that poop hard in their diapers. It’s humiliating enough that it happened. That Kankri has to bear witness is—can you spontaneously teleport to Mars? Is that a thing you can do?

You try not to look him in the eye when you bring down the rest of your laundry. He finds your crusty clothes immediately and sets them aside with your sheets, careful not to touch the stains too much. Fuck, you’re disgusting. And you can’t even do your own laundry so you can stop being so fucking embarrassed. No, you have to rely on Kankri, flawless Kankri, selfless Kankri, to do it for you. He won’t show you how, just starts running the cold tap in the utility sink so he can fill the basin and pre-soak your stains out. “I’m glad you told me eventually,” he says over the running water. “But I would have been able to take care of this much sooner if you had just been honest with me from the outset.”

The way he says it, it sounds like you were lying. That’s not it. That’s not it at all. You just kind of… wish it had never happened. “Sorry,” you mumble at your backpack while you dig your homework out.

Kankri doesn’t forgive you. “Just don’t do it again,” he insists, and you nod dumbly. “I’m not sure your sheets will be done by the time you’re supposed to go to bed. Will you be okay if you sleep somewhere else?”

 _Or are you just going to do that again?_ is the unspoken second half of the question. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Kankri says idly, sitting down at the kitchen table with you and riffling through his math textbook. Everything looks so intimidating. You’ve just barely worked up to getting letters in your numbers, and he’s doing something called precalculus, where the letters make the numbers into pretty curves and lines and graphs. You don’t understand anything anymore, how something that good can be extrapolated from equations this ugly. “You can sleep in my bed,” he decides for you as he picks out his problem set for the night. “Oh, and Father left the credit card for us tonight. I’m supposed to pick up dinner for both of us. What would you like from Rizzo’s?”

That’s the vegan place ten minutes away. “I don’t want Rizzo’s.”

“You’re eating Rizzo’s.” He wants to be out of the house, you realize. Away from you. You’ve fucked up that badly. He might be at the other end of the table from you, but he seems a million miles away. Unreachable. “Do your homework. Or do you need help with that as well?”

“I can do it.” That might be the only thing you _can_ do on your own at this point.

The minutes tick by slowly, inexorably. Every formula Kankri writes out is in a practiced hand, his graphs perfectly plotted. You can barely read your own chickenscratch. The washer peters out and Kankri gets up to change it over, starting the dryer and getting another load going; while he’s gone, you look in the back of your textbook for the answers to your worksheet. Then, “Karkat, would you kindly bring me the dishwasher soap?”

You slam your book shut on your own hand. “Fuck,” you say to no one in particular, sucking your fingers into your mouth. “Coming,” and you get it from under the sink. “Why do you need this for clothes?”

“These stains aren’t coming out. This is my second attempt to prewash at this point.” Kankri sighs. “I’m really working very hard to make sure you don’t have to throw these sheets away. I’m sure they’re salvageable if I work on them hard enough, but this isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. Squirt some on my hand, please,” and he holds his palm out to you.

Fumbling fingers lock the cap against the child-proofing before you remember you have to squeeze on the way off. The gel comes out thick and clear on Kankri’s fingertips. Then he’s plunging his hand into the cold water in the sink basin, hissing at the temperature, so he can dredge out your filthy laundry and at least pretend to make it clean again. You’re horrified to watch as he massages the soap into the fabric of your flat sheet, then the fitted one, so gentle it barely suds up. “Let me do it,” you tell him on instinct, because he’s _touching_ what you _did_ and it’s _awful_.

“You don’t know how,” he reminds you. Now that both sheets are done, he moves onto your pants, rubbing his fingers against the fly of them, between the buttons, _underneath_ , so he can scrub out everything bad you did. It’s just clothes, but it’s like you can feel the circular motion against the base of your brain, literally trying to rub in what you’ve done. “I think if I let this set for a while longer,” he says eventually, once the soap is off his fingers and saturating into cotton, “I’ll be able to put it through a few wash cycles. It might not be the same once I’m done, but it’ll still be your laundry. I just hope that stain isn’t permanent.”

“Me too,” you say with as large a voice as you can muster. You fucking too.

“Now,” Kankri says, like he never heard your little whimper, “I’m going to go out for a while and bring back dinner. Do your homework, and no video games until I can see you’ve finished. You’ll be good, won’t you?”

“Yeah,” you mumble. He never tousles your hair, though you think he might for a minute. He sometimes does. Then again, you kind of fucked up really bad and ruined his night. “When will you be back?”

“In time to put you to bed,” he tells you, grabbing his Lexus keys and heading out the door.

Well, that’s as vague a promise as ever you’ve heard. That’s the only condition on his freedom. And he’s supposed to pick you up dinner. Is he going to let you starve? Just when that panic races through your head, your guts let out an embarrassing gurgle. If you’re not hungry now, you certainly will be soon. Fuck.

Your first foray through the drawer freezer under the french-door refrigerator is fruitless. Well, not exactly—Mom has all her frozen fruit for her morning smoothies—but there’s nothing here for you to make into a quick meal. You’re not one of those families that just has Hot Pockets or pizza rolls sitting around for junk food. Any frozen meal that comes into the house immediately gets snatched up by Dad so he can eat it at work.

The refrigerator comes up similarly empty, unless you want to have dinner that’s entirely celery sticks and baby carrots, and that’s supposed to be for the rest of this week’s lunches anyway. Mom would notice if you took one of her protein shakes, and Kankri would notice if you got into the leftovers. And it’s not like you can reach the microwave to heat them up, anyway—you’re still too short to reach that far above the stove, and Kankri would notice if you moved a chair out of place or left a mark on the ceramic cooktop where you climbed up.

Walking into the pantry is similarly disappointing. There’s an entire shelf full of baking books and a stand mixer and appliances and cake mixes so your mom can put together emergency cookies and brownies for fundraisers, but none of that is something you can just put in your mouth and not be hungry. There’s pasta, and rice, and soup, and canned vegetables, but none of that is a meal on its own, and there would be dishes, wouldn’t there. You can’t do dishes yet, Kankri’s never taught you how to clean the nonstick cookware and you only know how to put soap in the dishwasher, not how to run it, so he’d _know_ you were trying to avoid eating whatever kind of rabbit food he’s bringing home.

It’s very quiet in the background now, too. The dryer’s done, and the washer’s stopped spinning. Fuck. What are you supposed to do? Is it your job to switch over the loads? What did Kankri want to do next? All you want to do is make sure your nasty laundry gets in and out as fast as possible. Can you just… gently move things into a basket without having to fold them, since you don’t quite know how? Shit, Kankri will notice. The buttons on the dryer look like they’re written in Greek to you—you don’t know what those settings do, what if you ruin the clothes that are about to go in there? You don’t know how to set the washer, either, how much soap it needs, and what’s this fabric softener and liquid bleach stuff? Why couldn’t you just pour the bleach all over your stuff? Wouldn’t that make it clean?

Your stomach knots in on itself again. You can’t feed yourself and you can’t do your own laundry. What kind of worthless piece of shit are you? You want to lay down in bed and pull the blankets up over your ears and lay in the dark for a while but you can’t even do that because your sheets are still unclean and soaked through and _you can’t do anything about it_.

“Oh, have you finished your homework already?” Kankri’s voice interrupts your inner panic. He doesn’t slam the door on the way in, even though he has his hands full of takeout.

“Yes?” comes out shrill, your voice cracking. Fuck, you’re the worst. “I thought you said—“

“Did you think I’d leave you on your own for dinner?” he chides you. Yes. Yes, you absolutely thought that, because he said—“I said I’d be back to put you to bed, and I am, aren’t I, so.” One of the plastic takeout boxes goes on top of your half-done math worksheet; Kankri either doesn’t catch on that you lied, or he’s willing to let your grades suffer for your own bad decisions. “Eat up.”

The clear plastic lid on your dinner is fogged over. When you take off the cover, a rabbit-y smell hits you in the face. “The fuck is this?”

“For the second time tonight, Karkat, watch your language, or I might have to make you eat soap for dinner.”

Soap might be preferable. He brought you back _quinoa_. You _fucking hate_ quinoa. And the beans, shit, the _beans_ , all mixed in with the quinoa, and nothing to break it up but pepper slivers and onion bits with fakey fake grill marks on them. Your entire torso throbs with hunger so insistently you think you might faint, but your esophagus is currently doing some kind of gymnastics in your throat that makes you want to throw up.

“Eat your dinner,” Kankri says again, and passes you plastic silverware.

You don’t really have much of a choice, do you. Your hand betrays you, grabbing the spoon (because fuck if you’re trying to stab little grains and strings of veggies with a fork) and shoveling the first steaming bite into your mouth. It kind of burns your tongue a little. That might be a good thing, because you can’t imagine yourself eating all of this otherwise, even though you’re starving. It has the consistency and taste of very crunchy glue with random curry packets not mixed in all that well.

He must hate you. There’s no other reason for him getting you your least favorite thing from your least favorite restaurant. You can deal with the portobello burger, which is what Kankri’s currently shoving in his big fat mouth, juice dripping down his fingers—his favorite, you know, with the sweet potato fries on the side that are actually okay. But he gets you this, after you did that, and—he has to hate you. That’s the only reason. He wants to punish you and take care of you all at the same time, and you’re so hungry that you have to take what he’s offering you or curl in on yourself to starve.

“Don’t make that face,” Kankri tells you. “I got you the healthiest thing on the menu. Quinoa has some of the most balanced proteins you’ll find outside of— _ugh_ —actual meat.” If you focus on his words instead of what you’re swallowing, it makes eating easier, even though the way he talks is just as unappetizing. “It’s naturally gluten free and contains iron, all your B vitamins, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, vitamin E and fiber. It’s also a complete protein and has all your pernine essential amino acids. Now, the legumes have protein, too, but…”

You tune him out under the sound of your not-chewing. He can talk about whatever the hell he wants, so long as he’s not chewing you out. The inside of your mouth feels both sticky and dry, it’s weird. But god bless you, you’re trying. You actually manage to scorf the whole thing down before Kankri’s finished with his fries. When you throw your takeout container in the trash, you glare at your older brother. “Happy now?”

“Very. Father would feel better, knowing you ate what I brought you.”

Just the mention has your chest puffing up. You took one for the team, didn’t you. Dad loves this health food stuff, wants you to be as much of a fan as he is, and you’re trying, but you’re just a kid and you do love you some Doritos sometimes. But if you can eat that, maybe you can even eat (bleargh) fucking _kale_ if you try hard enough. That’s emboldened you enough to try your luck: “Can I go play the N64?”

“Show me your worksheet first,” he says, carefully picking at his fingertips with a paper napkin. His fingers aren’t greasy by the time you hand it over, still incomplete. “Karkat, please. Your grades are already abysmal. You need to do your homework.”

“Why?”

“Because you need good grades to go to law school, and your report cards right now are, to put it mildly, offensive.”

You’re not even twelve, you’re _eleven_ , you want to scream at him. You’re not supposed to be thinking about going to college and getting degrees. You’ll be lucky if you make it through sixth grade intact. “I already know what six plus nine is,” you grouse, swiping the paper back out of his hand. You hope it cuts. “I don’t need an _n_ in there to tell me what I’m doing.”

“Then you shouldn’t have any problem finishing this worksheet.” For his part, Kankri’s tidying up, taking a washcloth to the table where you spilled a bit of dinner and rinsing glasses. He changes out the laundry again, and then he moves onto an entirely different subject, some sort of English assignment that means he has to highlight parts of speech with different colors and underline participial phrases, whatever those are. Fuck if you know how to speak coherent English a lot of the time. It’s hard enough for you to read normal stuff, you have no idea how you’re going to handle being in high school.

What’s important, though, is that your sheets _still_ aren’t in the wash and it’s starting to get dark out. While you’re still scratching out the meaning of _d_ on your math worksheet, Kankri’s moved on to his Spanish homework. He finishes even that by the time he finally, _finally_ dredges up your dirty stuff and wrings it out. “Well?” you ask him, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“Too soon to tell,” he mutters, frowning at it. “It might take a few washes.” You look at the clock at the same time he does. “Where do you want to sleep tonight?” he asks you

 _My own bed_ , but you can’t, can you. And you can’t fall asleep in your parents’ room, because that’s just weird, being the kid who crawls to Mommy and Daddy in the middle of the night because he’s scared of his own brain. It takes a real little kid to be afraid of the dark or freaked out by nightmares. (Says the infant who _wet the bed_ , look at you, you little hypocrite, you’re following in your big brother’s footsteps _so well_.) You don’t want to sleep on the couch because it’s not that comfy and it’s too bright out downstairs and you don’t want to wake up when Mom starts making breakfast. “Your room?” comes out of you, voice impossibly small.

Kankri only lets out a _tiny_ huff at that, not a huge one. “Fine,” he says. “I guess I can let you sleep in my bed for one night, since you made a mess all over your own sheets. I’m taking a risk on you.” Is it even physically possible for you to feel more ashamed? Because you keep trying to outdo yourself. “I might not go to bed for a little while, though, I have to finish my chemistry lab.”

“So can I stay up?” Is it too much to ask?

“Yes.” But before you can make a move for a game controller, “To take a shower,” he finishes his sentence. “I don’t want you rubbing your greasy head all over my pillow, I have enough problems with pimples as it is. Not to belittle those with diagnosable acne vulgaris, of course! But I have no wish to become among those afflicted. It makes one feel almost like a leper. I’ll wash my face, and you’ll wash your hair, and we’ll make the most of it.”

You don’t know what he’s talking about. You’ve never seen him break out before. But if you’re that grimy to him, then maybe you should get clean. This will be your second shower today, but the first one probably doesn’t count, because you still felt weird afterwards, like the stain you’d made in your bed was something that doesn’t just wash out with soap.

The bathroom is the only room in the house with a lock on it, and that’s only because you and Kankri share it. Not even the master bedroom has a way to keep you out, but that’s because you’re never supposed to go in. You try to lather up while you’re in the shower, but nothing makes you feel better. Your belly feels weird and twisted after this morning, after dinner, and it’s almost like there’s something itchy under your hair or at the back of your neck that you can’t quite scratch. You don’t know what’s wrong with you. You don’t know why you feel too big for your skin, like it’s stretched tight over a wireframe made of gently vibrating panic. You feel a little bit like you got hit by a truck.

Maybe you just need to sleep.

Kankri isn’t quite upstairs by the time you walk into his room. It’s weird in here. Nothing like yours at all. He has so many bookcases in here, with all the books he reads that he doesn’t even have to read for school or anything. They’re even alphabetized. His closet door is always primly closed, and there’s no clothes on the floor, dirty or otherwise. He isn’t allowed to keep his computer in here, but there’s empty space on his desk for if it was. And his bed, pushed into the corner of the room, is crisply made, even the duvet with its box-pleat corners. It’s bigger than yours, too, a full bed for a full adult, not the twin you have.

There’s two pillows, but bunched one under the other, like he sleeps with both. Should you take one? Do you not get one? Should you bring your own, even though they’re naked without any pillowcases on? You tug at a loose thread in your sleep pants and it feels like it tugs at your stomach. This is weird. This place isn’t yours and you don’t belong in it, but it’s the only bed you have.

You crawl in like an invader and try to make yourself as small as you can, flattening yourself to the wall and facing the door so you can stay on high alert for intruders. Maybe you can make sure he won’t even notice you. He already doesn’t want you here, and you don’t want to make this worse. Still, even as relaxed as you can make yourself, you can’t sleep, because _what if it happens again?_ Here, in someone else’s bed?

Kankri comes into his own room an eternity later, smelling like soap and pomp. You didn’t realize that he slept in that long-sleeved shirt—you thought he slept in just his boxers, like you prefer just your flannel pants and no shirt or briefs or anything. But he slips into bed facing you, and his body is so warm, even his feet as they brush against your freezing toes. “Did I wake you?” he says, hushed and warm.

“No.”

“Were you awake this whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” Like hell are you telling him anything. “Is it because my room is strange?” Shake of your head. “Is it because the bed is too big?” Another shake, even more vigorous this time, because you’re jealous, you want to spread out like he can. But he doesn’t take up too much room, and he lets you know without words that it’s okay to come away from the wall and closer to the center. “Is it because you’re scared?” You bury your face in the pillow. It’s not a _no_ , and yet.

He runs a hand down your bare arm. His body is so hot compared to yours, like you’re just a pile of ashes and he’s still red as fire. “’m not _scared_ ,” you lie.

“I don’t think you want that to happen again, though.” Waiting for a response, then, “Do you?” You don’t move your face from where your nose is pressed into animal-cruelty-free down. “It’s okay, Karkat.”

“’s not,” you mumble into your faceful of bed.

“It’s okay,” he repeats ardently, like his tone would make it any less of a lie. The more he pets your arm, the more you realize you’re shaking. He left bruises there earlier and it’s like he’s saying sorry without using words. “Oh, you poor little thing. You don’t know what happened, do you?”

This is a trick question. You don’t move, don’t speak, hardly dare to breathe. Your skin breaks out in goosebumps against Kankri’s fingers and you’re afraid he could read your guilt in Braille.

“I thought—I never realized this might happen so soon—at school they must have—did Father ever—“ He cuts himself off, _hem_ s a few times for good measure. “Ah. Well then. I suppose it has become incumbent upon me to teach you a few things about growing up.”

Your skin goes less shivery. When Kankri puts his arm around you, you huddle into him. It’s okay, you keep trying to tell yourself. He feels sorry for you. He wants to tell you what’s wrong with you. Besides everything, that is.

“There is a thing,” Kankri starts saying, and you realize he’s launching into Talk Mode, the way he talks like an impassable wall of text. “That happens to young men about your age.” Men. You’re a man. Not a boy, a man. Not a baby, an adult. Your chest feels funny. “That’s called puberty. From the Latin _puber_ , meaning adult. The process your body goes through to make you into a grown-up.”

“Like a pupa?”

“Like a pupa,” he confirms, and kisses you on the forehead. Your scalp feels tingly and you decide you like that feeling. “And sometimes, your body will let you know when it’s time to start changing from a child into an adult, like a caterpillar knows how to make a chrysalis and turn into a butterfly.”

“Will I be pretty?” you ask him.

“You’re already pretty,” he tells you, and snuggles closer. “And there’s nothing wrong with being a worm, _per se_.” One of those phrases Dad uses, but you never understand. “But you have to grow up sometime, and this is when you’ve started to grow up.”

Your face scrunches as you try to parse what he’s saying. “I don’t get it.”

“Shh, I’m getting there.” His hand runs in sweeping gestures all up and down your bare spine. The cotton of his shirt feels good against your front. There’s pictures of the two of you all up in each other’s business like this, from before Kankri went to school. He was five, and you were one, and he would curl around you protectively and wrap your baby hand around his little finger. He’s trying to make you feel like an adult, but all you can think about is how much older he is, he’s four years older, he’s practically legal already and you’re still just some dumb grade schooler who pees the bed. “I didn’t realize you were this much taller already.”

“Is that why my bed feels so short?”

“Probably. Mother and Father will probably buy you a new one soon. And Father’s so tall, you’ll probably be as tall as he is.” You’ll be as tall as Dad, that’s why you’re growing so early. There might be some hope for you after all.

Kankri keeps nattering at you, even though your chest feels like it might evacuate from your body and start floating up to the ceiling. “You’ve started growing, and, ah. I’m sure you’ve noticed your entire body growing as well. Things like your hair, perhaps,” and at this he runs his fingertips along your scalp and parts your still-damp hair with his fingers and you like that, you like that very much. “Getting coarser and darker in other places. Or your voice—I noticed your voice cracking earlier.”

“Thanks,” you tell him sarcastically, and it cracks again, because this is your life and that was inevitable.

“It’s another sign that your body is ready to become an adult. But one of the most prominent signs is—“ He halts. “There’s really no good way to explain this, but I don’t want you left in the dark because of any discomfort from me. You deserve to know what’s happening to you, and since no one else will explain, the task has fallen upon me. Do you know why you did what you did last night?”

You’re going to spontaneously combust. The edges of you are going to curl inwards towards the flame and get eaten alive like every other part of you. “No,” you tell the pillow.

Kankri gently extricates your face, turns you towards him. You’re both on your sides. His one leg is between both of yours, an easy tangle, a soft familiarity. His hands are so gentle. “It’s called a nocturnal emission,” he says, voice clipped and clinical. “During the night, your body became aroused, and your member became erect, probably as it received sensation from your pants and your sheets. You rubbed against the fabric until you ejaculated in your sleep. Do you know what that means? Ejaculate?”

“Something gross,” you mumble, and try to push away from Kankri’s hand to go back to ostriching your head in the pillow.

“You had a release,” he says, and you think he’s using a euphemism but you can’t really tell because you’re stupid and he’s smart and he’s done all this before and you’re just a dumb kid that spills something or another from his dick onto his sheets in the middle of the night. “The fluid is called semen. It’s pearl to white and can be thick, but yours may have seeped through your clothes to get on your sheets like it did. Perhaps you had multiple nocturnal emissions in the night.” He sounds only mildly disgusted with you, thankfully.

You’re disgusted enough with yourself for the both of you. “I did what?”

“You orgasmed in your sleep.”

Oh. _OH._ That’s a word. A word you know from the shitty health class you took back around the winter, where everything was people sniggering at textbook diagrams and passing around crude slang for cocks like it was social currency. “But I—“ You don’t know how to tell Kankri he’s wrong. “I thought orgasms only happen with other people?”

“So you’ve had some formal education about this already,” Kankri surmises, mostly to himself. Your blood is rushing too hard in your ears to be able to hear him properly. “What do you know about orgasms?”

You’re going to launch off of this planet and throw yourself into the sun. Kankri keeps stroking your back, he’s never stopped, slow up and down, measured like your breathing cadence as you struggle to keep your breath under control. “They—when two people have sex, they touch each other, the boy’s thing goes in the girl’s, and if they orgasm then they can have a baby, and—but I thought if, you can only do it with two people? I don’t know.” You suddenly feel very stupid.

“You can orgasm by yourself, if that’s a thing you want to do.” Kankri tells you. You’re so glad he’s letting you know these things. Fuck, you thought you wet the bed like a baby, but this—what you did—it means you’re turning into an adult? So that’s a good thing. Sort of? Then why did you feel so dirty? “But when you orgasm with other people—Karkat, I want you to listen to me.” His soothing hand stops. The quiet is too loud, feels like dead weight on your eardrums; your heartbeat pushes back. “I’m very serious about this. That’s a very adult thing to do, a very serious thing to do, and you need to make sure you’re doing the right thing.”

“Uh-huh?” Why did he stop talking? Everything makes more sense when he’s talking.

The hand starts rubbing again. Staying around the small of your back, in a broad, hot circle. Your guts wind themselves tighter, mirroring every movement of Kankri’s hand. Everything between your legs does something hot, heavy, like a pulse, like a throb, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before. It’s too much, and you’re choking on your own tongue. And while that bloodrush goes to a place that’s never been this sensitive before, Kankri’s hand moves around, to the soft of your belly, with his hand flat against your navel and your stomach squirming underneath.

And then he leans forward, and he kisses your cheek. Your nose. And then—other hand coming up, up to your face, two hands, too many, takes your jaw gingerly between thumb and forefinger, and kisses you.

Closed mouths. Easy pressure, gentle slide. Not a peck, so this isn’t like the kisses you’ve had before. Not little playground things, not truth or dare. This isn’t a game. This one rushes through all of you, flies straight down your spine and makes everything too bright and too much again. The tingle is coming from inside your skin, like light that wants to burst out of you, or darkness that wants to rush into you.

Kankri leaves you, retreats to the other side of the pillow. “I love you,” he says. “So much, Karkat. I want to take care of you, I just wish you would let me. I need to know how to help you.”

You’re drowning and you need him to reach in and pull you to safety. You’re dizzy and you need him to hold you until things make sense again. “I,” and there’s nothing else there, just a cracked vowel that wobbles in the silence of the room.

“You’re an adult now, and this is,” he’s saying, “what adults do, to help each other. To take care of each other. And I want to take care of you, but you need to let me.”

His hand slips down and lands on the fly of your pants and everything stops.

The world is glass. Your breath could shatter it. Your heart cuts itself on it. Your dick is swollen and it aches and you’ve never felt like this before and it sort of hurts but not in a pain way, in an anticipation way, and you don’t know what will make it better but you don’t want to trust fate to take care of it for you. _Nocturnal emission_ , runs through your head, and _orgasm_ , and _ejaculate_ , and if you go to sleep like this and rub against your pants and Kankri’s sheets it’ll get all over his bed and all over _him_ and you couldn’t do that to him, couldn’t make him all disgusting just because your body is being selfish.

“Baby.” The nickname he’s used for you since you came home from the hospital, sometimes mocking, sometimes fond, but this time the sound has an impact to it that hits you straight in the chest and lodges right between your lungs. “If you ever need someone to take care of this for you, just let me know. It’s okay. I love you. You know how everyone says you should only do this with people who love you? To show how much you love them?”

He pulls down your sleep pants.

“I love you so much.”

And wraps the hand that was at your back, at your belly, around your cock.

“Let me help you.”

The loop of his fingers pulls up, drags against sensitive skin that’s never been touched like this before, and you close your eyes and don’t know why you wish you weren’t here when it feels so good.

“You’re an adult now, baby.”

Then why do you feel so small? Why do you feel so weak? His fingers go back down, cupping around you as they slide, and your hips jerk into his hand.

“I need you to know—you can’t do this with just anyone.”

He never stops talking, his voice urgent even as his hand is patient. Like he’s waiting for something, even though you don’t know what he’s waiting for. His hand passes up and then back down again, the same easy cadence he was using to rub your back, moving with your breath, except yours starts going backwards every time the sensitive skin at the head of your dick grazes against the thinness at the inside of his wrist.

“You can only do this with people who love you.”

You want to crawl out of your own skin. You want to stop breathing because it doesn’t matter, you can’t get enough air anyway. Your body is too small for you, or too big, maybe, you feel like you’re roaming around in a suit that isn’t yours and your hands catch blindly on someone else’s sheets and Kankri breathes into your hair as he kisses your front cowlick and nudges at your face with his nose so he can kiss your lips again.

“You have to know they love you, really know it, body and soul, or you’re just going to turn into a whore, some degenerate generic slut.”

Faster, because you’re hiccupping now, not sure how to comprehend this physical blitzkrieg except in disparate parts. The cling of Kankri’s lips to yours. His fingers grazing, first your sack, then the tender gap at the inside of your thigh. The sweetness of his breath in your face. The welcoming grasp of him around you again, slick and hot with some sort of gross sticky clear stuff that’s drooling out of you. You’re disgusting, you’re just a fountain of fluids from your dick, snot from your nose as you sniffle, prickle of tears behind your eyes, sweat gathering at your hairline. But Kankri, he loves you, he wants to take care of you, and he cleaned up after you, and he’ll clean up after you again, just keep making you a mess and clean up every time, except what if you’re too dirty to be clean ever again? What if you’re too filthy to wash this away?

“It’s okay, baby. I love you. You know I love you. Let go.”

Of what? You’re holding on so tight, nails digging into cotton and worrying little holes, tension spiraling around your bones and locking you in place. You don’t know what’s coming, but something big, you can taste it behind your teeth, a horizon, a nuclear bomb—

“Release.”

Your body listens. Something in you unhinges and you know you won’t ever be able to latch it closed again. A howl like grief gets stuck in your lungs and you hunch in, try to draw away, even as Kankri draws it out of you—whatever _it_ is that’s making you tremble, that feels like shattering without any guarantee of being put back together. It’s not just that your cock throbs in his hand, it’s that something _else_ is coming from it, these little pearl-globs of sticky that pass with every pulse and catch on Kankri’s fingers, on your sleep pants.

The only thing missing from this symphony of filth is vomit, and even that’s tucked away against the back of your throat as Kankri drags his hand up, _off_ finally, wiping it on the flannel of your sleep pants before letting the elastic snap against your skin. “It’s okay,” he tells you. You can’t cry. That would make you into a whiny little baby, and he thinks you’re an adult. Should you feel like an adult? “I’ll always take care of you when that happens. You won’t make your bed dirty any more.”

Then why do you still feel so filthy? You want to get up, change out of your clothes that are now sticking to you with drying spooge, take your third shower in twenty-four hours, but your spine is cold against the drywall and you can’t climb over Kankri or you’ll get it all over him, all over his sheets, and he’ll be mad, and you don’t think you could handle that right now. “Let me get up.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, though,” Kankri insists, and he loops his arm—the hand that just touched you—around to your back, caressing you like he wasn’t just touching your privates. “This is normal. This is all a part of growing up.”

He never stops talking. Even while your brain is stuttering, trying to get back online without sudden onset Tourette’s syndrome drowning out your thoughts, his voice seeps into you, saturates you. He mumbles himself into sleep, but your heart is still kicking in your chest and your lungs still feel too full when you take in a breath. Is growing up supposed to hurt like this? The pain that isn’t from a bruise or a cut but from somewhere between your ribs and your stomach, a hollow place you want to scrape at so you can feel something real? Is growing up supposed to be this terrifying? Kankri seems like he’s fine, why are you being such a baby about this?

He doesn’t play with you like he used to, but that’s because you’re not a child anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a week and a day before your twelfth birthday and even Dad knows how tall you are now. He made it, he was able to come to your stupid little sixth grade graduation, but what’s important is that he doesn’t have to lean down so much to hug you now. He smiles, like he does, all wide and honest, and says “my son” in that voice like he might actually be proud of you, and tells you that you might end up taller than him by the time you quit growing. It makes you feel like you’re _flying_ until you have to hug him goodbye, he has to go back to work, he won’t miss your birthday but that means he has to go back to the office and work extra hard.

He never takes a day off and sometimes that worries you.

What worries you even more is that Kankri hasn’t let you sleep in your own bed since he found out you were having wet dreams. At first he said it was because your sheets were ruined, but Mom bought you replacements and Kankri _still_ can’t be assed to make your bed. After Dad goes back to work and Mom jets off to the PTA Fundraiser Ball or whateverthefuck, Kankri folds you into his bed, your back to the wall, before he climbs in himself. “It’s a true pity Father’s too busy to spend very much time with you,” he says, like he’s not stabbing you with every word.

“That—” Your voice keeps cracking around him. “That’s not true,” you try again, and feel like you’re lying.

“He only stayed an hour or two,” Kankri points out. His knees bump against yours. When his hand grabs for your shoulder, you scoot closer to him. He won’t—not again, he wouldn’t—“I’m not sure he wanted to attend your little commencement ceremony. It’s only a changing-over of grades—you changed schools last year and he took the entire evening off of work for that.”

You can’t tell him to stop because he’s not wrong. “Shut up,” you say instead.

He never listens. “If I were to speculate on why he didn’t want to stay for the attempted parent reception, I might go so far as to say your grades simply weren’t good enough. He doesn’t want to spend time around you when you disappoint him like that.”

You must be disappointing Kankri, too. He doesn’t dawdle tonight. He just holds you close with an arm around your shoulders and a hand down your sleep pants, jerking you off hastily with his lips smeared against your temple. Like he doesn’t want to expend any effort on you, like you’re not worth him taking his time. “Kankri!” you yell at him, because it’s too much, too fast, it feels like he’s forcing it out of you.

“Don’t worry,” he tells you, thumb rubbing a circle into the place between your shoulderblades and mouth sinful hot at your ear. “I still love you. I’ll always love you the most.” The chafe-burn against the most sensitive skin you have makes it feel more like sin than love, though.

You climax suddenly, messily, biting your tongue so hard you draw blood and blowing against the inside of your sleep pants. Kankri doesn’t even have to wipe his hand off on you this time; you must be learning how to keep it to yourself, how not to make him disgusting with your filth. The texture of wet, sticky cotton is too loud against your skin, and you stare at your brother until you’re sure he’s asleep next to you. Can you shower in the middle of the night? Can you get up and change and come back, or will he notice? Should you just go sleep somewhere else?

In his sleep, Kankri idly reaches for you, loops an arm around your waist, snuffles his way into the hollow of your collarbone. He’s your brother and he loves you. He’s just trying to take care of you. And while you stare into the darkness of his room, your pulse tries to jump out of your skin every time he shifts against you.

\--

Dad says you can get your own full bed.

Full bed, like you’re a full boy. Not a boy—a full adult, even. Kankri certainly seems to think so. On the nights when he doesn’t touch you, he whispers secrets to you, secrets only adults get to know. Like how to tell whether you love someone or not. How you can only love one person deeply enough to have that kind of pure connection with them. The ways you can fail someone if you say you love them but your attention starts to wander. How much rejection hurts. Why you stop loving people entirely. That it’s never good to stick around when that love turns into hate, because you can ruin someone like that, taint them with your touch.

Will he keep talking to you like this if you get your own big bed? Because you like these nights the best, the nights when he tells you all the things you need to know about growing up without punctuating it with a hands-on lesson. Sometimes he’ll hold you close and mumble into your hair, his heartbeat under the shell of your ear louder than his voice and more intimate than his whisper. Sometimes he’ll face you, both of you on your side of the pillows, and gravely explain your naïve childhood mistakes as you drift off, never remembering where he left off in his monologue.

Because he’ll start one and then keep it going for _days_ if he can. He never loses his train of thought, and he’s always full of so many words. If he’s been constantly derailing himself for a few days, he’ll end up full circle, explaining the basics to you. What it means when you get an erection. How to know if you’re ready to have sex with someone. Why you never want to cheat on your one significant other. The kinds of names people will call you.

Your new furniture gets here tomorrow. This is the last night you’ll have to stay in Kankri’s bed. And it’s one of _those_ nights. “When you lose your virginity,” he tells you, quiet like the darkness might be able to overhear you, “I want you to pick that person carefully.”

“That—that p—” You stutter, because he’s got your dick in the loose-looped cage of his fingers and he’s drawing off slow, so slow, before he shifts your foreskin on the way back down. “That _girl_ ,” you sigh out.

“Oh?” A slight stutter, then the movement halts entirely. You open your eyes. Kankri’s looking at you quizzically. “I never took you for the kind of young man who was so exceedingly heteronormative.” You don’t know what the words mean, but you’re pretty sure he’s insulting you. “Of course, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt—I’m sure you’re surrounded by peers who casually use the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘unpopular’—but really, baby, you should think about changing your language for your own benefit.”

He’s talking too much and moving too little. You don’t know what to say, besides mumbling “fucking _gay_ ” under your breath because that seems to piss him off, and you don’t know what to do, besides shove your hips against him with a little more purpose.

The hand on you squeezes too hard to be pleasurable, then retreats entirely. You make a disgusting whimpering noise that feels like throwing up in your own mouth. “Karkat,” he snaps at you, like he’s cursing at you, and you shrink into yourself. Fuck, you fucked it up, you always fuck everything up—“I want you to listen to me, and I want you to understand what I’m saying. _Don’t do that_. Don’t take more than people are offering you. Don’t push people to go faster than they’re ready for. That’s ignoring consent, and that’s _rape_ , baby. Do you understand me?”

You didn’t just fuck it up, you fashioned a perfect dumpster for yourself and threw this right in there and then wallowed around in it. You are trash. You are _horrible_. “I’m sorry.”

He goes back to fondling you immediately—how can he bring himself to touch something so disgusting? Are you even human anymore? “Don’t do it again,” he murmurs to you, warm and bright, and gives you another slow, agonizing stroke. “Where was I…? Oh, I believe I was instructing you on how to properly pick a partner for your first time.”

“Please just touch me.” You can’t stand the glacial pass of heated fingers over heated flesh.

“Baby, really. This is important. I can’t halt your education merely because you have a tendency to get distracted by the physical.” He twists his wrist just so and you choke on your own spit. “That first time,” and he just keeps _talking_ , it’s _unbearable_ , “you have to make sure, double triple sure, that this is the right time, and the right person. If you’re nervous, at all, about _anything_ , don’t do it.”

You’re shivery right now, though, trying to hide the tremors in your skin from his questing hands. “What if—”

“It has to be _meaningful_ ,” he talks right over you. “If you go into that first time thinking it’s not going to mean anything to you, well, first of all, you would have been horribly misguided, and I’m not going to let that happen to you. And second of all, they will want it to be meaningful, too. So you have to make it count, and choose carefully.”

Slow pass of skin on skin. Your dick is drooling profusely. You can taste the sunrise on the underside of your tongue and it won’t show itself. “Kankri, _fuck!_ ”

“No, that’s what I’m saying, baby, it can’t be just a _fuck_ to you,” and he spits the word out like it hurts him to say it. “You only have one opportunity to make a memory as phenomenal as that. And it should be with someone you want to _keep_ making memories with, someone you truly love.”

Never mind that you don’t know what love is. Right now, love feels a lot like getting dangled over a cliff so you get dizzy staring at the chasm below but never allowed to fall and have the sweet relief of crashing into the ground. “I—”

“Don’t you dare embarrass yourself by sleeping around until you find someone who counts. You’d be just another whore if you did that.” Harsher grip from his hand, enough to really get you somewhere—“A _slut_ is all you’d be, willing to have sex with anyone if it made you feel good.” Speeding up, cadence as frantic as your racing heartbeat—“A degenerate lowlife who only thinks about his own pleasure and no one else’s.”

You cum with a shout, with him calling you names. “Don’t,” comes out of you in the wake of this latest orgasm, he can _do_ whatever he wants but he can’t just _say_ that to you.

“Don’t,” he mirrors back at you, and reaches up with the hand he just made filthy with your jizz and thumbs away the wet under your eyes. “I know you’re still redeemable after all. I won’t let you be like that, baby. I’ll always be here for you.”

But he gets tired of shushing you before you get tired of blinking out tears, and you can’t figure out why it’s harder to breathe when it’s this dark.

\--

Your new furniture is arriving tomorrow, Mom says while she makes your lunch. Crumbs of Goldfish spray out of your mouth in your excitement. “Shit, really?” Tonight, tonight is the last night, tomorrow night you won’t have to stay in Kankri’s bed and you can stay in your own and he won’t be able to mess with you, it’ll be over, finally, fucking finally. Three weeks was too long to put up with it.

“Yes, really.” Mom doesn’t even bother to chide you on your cursing anymore. She always wonders where you learn such filthy words, because Kankri certainly never swears and Dad never has the opportunity, but she never says you can’t say them. “Do you want a new bedspread to match?”

“Uh, _hell yeah_ ,” you tell her. “And new pillows?”

“If you want them,” she offers, ladling tomato soup out into three bowls. She has to leave soon to go to another planning meeting, but she said she could stick around long enough to feed you, she _said_ , she _promised_ , and as long as she’s here Kankri can’t do jack shit to you.

You’re getting a lot of new things in anticipation of your birthday this weekend. Can you push your luck? Kankri’s not even around to hear you ask, still busy on his computer talking to one of his friends he’s supposed to meet up with later while he leaves you here alone. “Um, Mom, can I—could I maybe—” How do you even ask for this. “Getalockonmydoor?” comes out in a rush.

“Aw, sweetie.” That’s the nothings that precede a _no_. “I always knock before I come in. It’s never been a problem before! You know your dad and I will always respect your privacy. Why do you think you need one?”

You’re so close. It’s right there, you can taste it on the tip of your tongue, all the things that want to spill out of you, but it’s like jamming a finger down your throat when poison control says you don’t even have to throw up. You gag on your own words for a second, get your throat back under control, and you only squeak a little when you start to explain. “I mean, we share a bathroom,” you don’t even want to say his name for fear you’ll summon him, “and I’m naked in there, and we have a lock on the bathroom, don’t we? And I’m naked in my room too, and, fuck. I know you knock, but it would just—feel better, I guess, if I had one.” That rationale was pitiful. You’ll never be a great persuader like your dad.

Mom looks like she’s listening, though. “Well,” she drawls out eventually, putting your soup down in front of you, “if it’s important to you, baby, we can always put a lock on your door. Just like the one on the bathroom door, if that would make you feel safer. Okay?”

What would make you feel safer is if she wouldn’t call you what he calls you. You throw your last handful of Goldfish in your soup and watch them slowly drown.

\--

It’s not a real lock. It’s just a little button you can push, no keyhole on the other side, just a little opening where someone can push in a paperclip and trigger your door right back open. But they’re replacing your doorknob and there’s nothing else you can do about it, it has to match the rest of the house, but this isn’t what you thought you were getting and you’re not sure why this is ruining your day when everything else has been so awesome. Dad’s going to be home all afternoon tomorrow for your birthday and he’s going to take you to the awesome medieval exhibit on loan at the museum in the city where there will be _swords_ and _armor_ and _reenactments_ and you’re going to do dinner with him, just him, just you and him, _best birthday ever_.

And your day is getting ruined by a square millimeter of space.

Your bed, you must admit, is awesome. It feels like it goes on for ages, you can spread out and fling yourself around and hog all the covers and it’s just you by yourself and it’s great. Or it would be, if every few minutes you didn’t hear a gentle _rapraprap_ at your door. “Go away,” you mumbled the first time, and it just got louder with every repetition. “Go _the fuck_ away!” you tell Kankri this time. Your door is _closed_ and _locked_ and he is _unwelcome_.

He mutters something on the other side of your door that you can’t quite catch, and his footsteps fall away. He’s going away, yes, you win, finally—except no, he went away so he could start scraping something _inside your keyhole_ , poking and prodding with awful metal-on-metal noises until something pops suddenly and the lock gives with just the right kind of pressure. It’s not long after that Kankri strides into your room, not proud but not ashamed, just treating it like it’s normal that he just broke into your personal space. “Are you all right?”

“I _was_ ,” you emphasize, and roll over to face away from him. Maybe he’ll go away if you ignore him.

“Well, I was just coming in to make sure you were in bed. You know Father prefers it if you keep a normal sleep schedule, and I want to help you with that.” The shift of your mattress tells you he just sat down at the corner of your bed. “You know you’ll owe a dollar for that,” he says offhandedly.

You snort. Of course not, because this is your life and it wants to fuck you over. “The swear jar isn’t real.” You pull a pillow over your head, jam it against your ear.

A gentle hand comes up to your arm, prods it down. “Yes, it is,” Kankri tells you. “And you owe a dollar. I know Mother has given up on correcting your foul language, but that’s no way for an adult to act, baby. That’s what children do, say rude words to frighten other people away. And if this is what it takes to make you pay for your mistakes, then I will make sure it’s literal.” A caress to your bare arm, and then his weight on your bed shifts—he’s, no, he’s, _he’s climbing in_ , and your heart cleaves in two, half jumping up to close off your airway, the other half dropping out of you to fall to your toes.

You’re still facing away from him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He just lays his head down on your pillow, puts his nose at the knot where your skull meets your spine, and slings an arm over your waist. His body slots against yours like it was meant to, like you were made for him to hold.

You don’t remember falling asleep, and you don’t remember waking up, mostly because it cycles throughout the night. It has to be every hour or so that you startle out of slumber, never able to sleep for more than forty-five minutes with someone nuzzling into your ribs as easily as he could stab you in the back. When his hand, _that_ hand, creeps along your front, your stomach swoops, but it goes _up_ , not down, and cradles your heartbeat against his palm, like that belongs to him, too. The way he breathes across your bare skin, the rasp of his clothes too loud against you, all of it makes you want to somehow jump out of yourself and into someone else, like you could leave this behind, but no, you’re stuck, trapped here. A loving embrace with someone who loves you, and you feel like you’re in a cage?

You’re such an ungrateful fuck.

Because Kankri keeps triggering your fight/flight reflex, you watch a dawn for the first time in years. Your twelfth birthday begins gray and only lightens, never colors. Kankri’s hand looks alien against your skin, ashen fingers curling around your hip and holding you fast. His body burns against yours, his lips whispering against your shoulderblades as he curls close around you.

Close enough that you feel something unyielding against the tender place where your inner thighs meet your crotch.

“Mmh,” Kankri doesn’t say, just makes a sleepy noise as he yanks you closer. Like you’re nothing more than a pillow, a stuffed animal, a soft thing for him to cling to. That pressure against your scrawny-ass thigh gap doesn’t cease, and you’re afraid to breathe too hard, have a noticeable pulse, because you don’t want to move and give it, give him, give _yourself_ any ideas. This must be why it happens overnight, because your body’s responding just like his, more out of reflex than because you want it.

Dread winds around your bones, a familiar friend, and it doesn’t let go even when Kankri draws his hips back, stops invading your personal space quite so personally. It just means his half-hard cock gets pressed against the small of your back through a layer of fabric. “Mmh,” he grunts out again, slipping a few times until he finds a position he likes. Or is he—he wouldn’t be—he said it was wrong to rub against—he can’t just—

It stops before you’ve resolved to bolt out of bed. The solid length of it just presses into your skin, no movement against you, and Kankri hooks his chin around your shoulder. You were panicked over nothing. There’s not even anything wet back there, besides your own cold sweat. He didn’t—you’re just being a fucking baby about it—did he?

In a few hours, Mom will ask you why you’re not eating your birthday cake breakfast. For now, you hope your stomach settles in time for dinner so you don’t disappoint your dad.

**Author's Note:**

> *hastily closes lid over myself in my metal garbage can*


End file.
